The Vaccines: ‘We want our new album to sound terrible in 10 years’

Band discuss intention to release genre-defining third album 'English Graffiti'

The Vaccines have revealed that they’ve been more adventurous with their forthcoming new album ‘English Graffiti’ and intend for the record to be so “genre-defining” that it will “sound terrible in 10 years”.

Speaking in the new Albums of 2015 issue of NME, which is on newsstands from tomorrow and available digitally, frontman Justin Young says that the band were sick of trying to sound “timeless” and wanted to make something different.

“I started to feel that being timeless isn’t a good thing. I wanted to make a record that was important in 2015 and sound like 2015, sonically and emotionally,” Young says. “People just aren’t ambitious in rock music. If you take hip-hop or pop, they’re a lot more adventurous, they break a lot more rules. If you listen to some of the stuff on the radio right now, it’s fucking far out.”

He continues: “We wanted to make something that sounds amazing next year and then terrible in 10 years! If you listen to anything from the 1990s now, it sounds fucking awful, but that’s part of its identity.”

Young adds that The Vaccines’ 2013 EP ‘Melody Calling’ was a signpost for their new material. “It was us embracing production and arrangement for the very first time,” he sas. “It was more stylised than anything we’ve done before. We’ve gone a step further than that now. The record’s hyper-stylised in a way we’ve never worked before. Nothing is natural sounding; it’s a lot more future sounding. We wanted to be more creative and exploratory. We wanted to make a genre-defining record rather than something that would just fit in.”

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The Vaccines will perform live at the NME Awards Tour 2015 with Austin, Texas. They will be joined on the bill by Run The Jewels and Royal Blood. The show takes place at the O2 Academy Brixton, London, on February 18, with tickets available now.